50,203 research outputs found
Git4Voc: Git-based Versioning for Collaborative Vocabulary Development
Collaborative vocabulary development in the context of data integration is
the process of finding consensus between the experts of the different systems
and domains. The complexity of this process is increased with the number of
involved people, the variety of the systems to be integrated and the dynamics
of their domain. In this paper we advocate that the realization of a powerful
version control system is the heart of the problem. Driven by this idea and the
success of Git in the context of software development, we investigate the
applicability of Git for collaborative vocabulary development. Even though
vocabulary development and software development have much more similarities
than differences there are still important differences. These need to be
considered within the development of a successful versioning and collaboration
system for vocabulary development. Therefore, this paper starts by presenting
the challenges we were faced with during the creation of vocabularies
collaboratively and discusses its distinction to software development. Based on
these insights we propose Git4Voc which comprises guidelines how Git can be
adopted to vocabulary development. Finally, we demonstrate how Git hooks can be
implemented to go beyond the plain functionality of Git by realizing
vocabulary-specific features like syntactic validation and semantic diffs
Democratic Education In The Egyptian Higher Education: Investigation Of Tutorsâ Perception Of Democratic Education In The Egyptian Higher Education
Democratic education (DE) sees young people not as passive recipients of knowledge, but rather as active co-creators of their own learning and valued participants in a learning community. This study investigates tutorsâ understanding and implementation of DE in the Egyptian Higher Education (HE). It investigates HE tutorsâ conception about learners controlling their educational process by being fully embedded in it. Data for this qualitative paper was collected from 20 tutors from two Egyptian universities via one-to-one interviews and focus groups. This study highlighted the inference of political events in Egypt, since 2011, on HE students in their way of thinking and reflecting and addressed the need of DE to be a part of the educational paradigm. This paper concluded that DE is based on placing students in the centre of their learning and empowering them. Also, tutor-student dialogic approach and tutor-student trust are essential approaches to implement DE
Mobility in higher education: new need to improve it?
The aim of The Bologna Process is, amongst others, to improve the mobility of students in Higher Education. The Erasmus programme helps students to study in other European Universities, know other countries, live another culture (folklore, food, language, etc.), develop autonomy and mature as an adult person. In Cadiz, Spain, the international seminar âImproving mobility through collaborative exchangeâ took place in May 2015. The participants were universities of Glasgow (UK), Madeira (Portugal), Gazi (Turkey), Linz (Austria), Zielona Gora (Poland) and Cadiz (Spain). Representatives from those countries expressed concern about problems that students might suffer during mobility. The literature has pointed out that the economic, social and academic stresses they experience can, in some cases, generate or exacerbate mental disorders (Bradley, 2000) and generate depression and anxiety (Russell et al, 2010; Ying & Han, 2006) which can even manifest itself in somatic symptoms (Mori, 2000); this could involve classroom absences and drug taking as side effects.This study describes the positive experiences of five University of Cadiz Erasmus students under a collaborative exchange between the universities, detailing the measures taken by the host universities to address potential stressful issues
Creativity and innovation in science and technology: Bridging the gap between secondary and tertiary levels of education
Purpose: This paper stems from a study which was conducted as a means to first, find out whether there is a gap between the secondary and tertiary education levels, second identify any existing gap in Science and Technology education, and third, examine the impact of the above upon studentsâ creativity and innovativeness at university level. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach: As such, a group of teachers and students at both secondary and tertiary levels were selected as the sample of the study. Questionnaires were administered to trained secondary school teachers and to university students. Interviews were also conducted to triangulate data. These enabled an analysis of the current situation in terms of studentsâ engagement/creativity/innovativeness in Science and Technology at secondary and tertiary levels.
Findings: The findings reveal a problematic situation arising with respect to beliefs and what truly prevails in the education sector at secondary and tertiary levels. This study has revealed a number of salient issues related to the gap existing between the secondary and tertiary levels of education in Mauritius, with special bearing on creativity and innovation in Science and Technology.
Research limitations/implications: Only three institutions were involved, with a small sample of students, so that the findings cannot be generalised. Moreover, gender is a variable that has not been taken into consideration.
Practical implications: The study has proposed a number of recommendations to enable Mauritian students (at secondary and tertiary levels) to develop creativity and hopefully become innovators. This leads us to believe that the recommendations emerging from this study will be beneficial to various stakeholders who wish to understand the gap existing between secondary and tertiary education in Science and Technology education.
Originality/value: This study takes a case study approach adopting a mixture of interviews, surveys and observations to understand the research problems with regards to the younger generations need to be equipped with scientific and technological advances in acquiring knowledge, new sets of skills and values. Therefore, this study endeavours to document the perceptions of learners and faculty staff
Sequential Selection of Correlated Ads by POMDPs
Online advertising has become a key source of revenue for both web search
engines and online publishers. For them, the ability of allocating right ads to
right webpages is critical because any mismatched ads would not only harm web
users' satisfactions but also lower the ad income. In this paper, we study how
online publishers could optimally select ads to maximize their ad incomes over
time. The conventional offline, content-based matching between webpages and ads
is a fine start but cannot solve the problem completely because good matching
does not necessarily lead to good payoff. Moreover, with the limited display
impressions, we need to balance the need of selecting ads to learn true ad
payoffs (exploration) with that of allocating ads to generate high immediate
payoffs based on the current belief (exploitation). In this paper, we address
the problem by employing Partially observable Markov decision processes
(POMDPs) and discuss how to utilize the correlation of ads to improve the
efficiency of the exploration and increase ad incomes in a long run. Our
mathematical derivation shows that the belief states of correlated ads can be
naturally updated using a formula similar to collaborative filtering. To test
our model, a real world ad dataset from a major search engine is collected and
categorized. Experimenting over the data, we provide an analyse of the effect
of the underlying parameters, and demonstrate that our algorithms significantly
outperform other strong baselines
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